Take 6 hard-boiled eggs and cut lengthwise. Put in a pan with 12 anchovies, some onion juice and 1 tablespoonful of finely chopped parsley. Season with salt, white pepper and a little nutmeg, grated. Then pour over all ½ pint of sour cream. Let boil up once and serve hot with croutons.
June 13 — No. 13
Italian
A brisk supper dish that comes together in about ten minutes once the eggs are boiled. The one thing to watch is the cream.
- "Let boil up once"Sour cream will break into grains and whey at a full boil, and lower-fat commercial sour cream is especially prone to it. Bring the pan just to a bare simmer and pull it off, or use crème fraîche, which holds together better under heat.
- Half a pint of sour creamOne cup in US measure. If you are working from a British edition, an imperial half pint is 10 fl oz, closer to 1¼ cups.
- Twelve anchoviesPeriod recipes may mean twelve whole salt-cured fish, each yielding two fillets, rather than twelve fillets; taste as you go and scale accordingly. Rinse salt-packed ones and pat dry. Chop them small and let them melt into the warming cream rather than leaving them whole.
- SaltIgnore the instruction to season with salt until the anchovies have dissolved and you have tasted. Twelve fillets carry a great deal of it.
- Onion juiceGrate a peeled onion on the fine side of a box grater and press the pulp through a sieve; a teaspoon or two of the liquid is plenty. It gives the sharpness without raw onion texture.
- NutmegGrate it fresh and use very little — an eighth of a teaspoon. Pre-ground nutmeg turns dusty and bitter against the anchovy.
- The eggsHalve them lengthwise and lay them cut side up in a single layer in a wide pan so they warm through without being stirred to pieces. They only need to heat, not cook further.
- Yield and servingThree light servings, or four as a first course. The croutons are structural rather than decorative: fry or toast squares of bread in butter and spoon the eggs and sauce over them so the cream is soaked up.
This belongs to a whole family of turn-of-the-century "national" egg dishes in which a single flavouring stands in for an entire cuisine — here anchovy and nutmeg do duty for Italy. Salted anchovies were among the Mediterranean products available to an English-speaking cook in 1900, arriving in barrels or tins and keeping well, so they carried a lot of geographic weight. The combination of hard-boiled eggs, anchovy and soured cream has sometimes been thought closer to Central European than Italian cooking, and the book's daily calendar format — a dish a day, each labelled with a country — was a popular device for selling variety to households cooking from a narrow repertoire. Sour cream appears often in these collections, at a time when cream soured naturally before refrigeration was universal.